


let me show you

by delightedpml



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: (not Dan or Phil), Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe, Amazingphil - Freeform, Angst, Character Death, Colour bandits, Daniel Howell - Freeform, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Fluff, Getting Together, Happy Ending, KickThePj - Freeform, M/M, Mental Instability, No cheating, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Trigger Warnings ARE Provided
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-04 00:02:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17887670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delightedpml/pseuds/delightedpml
Summary: dan was born a colour bandit, emotionless and one of the most destructive creatures in the universes. he doesn't mind his evil and repetitive life, but once tragedy strikes, dan finds himself loathing the monster he was born to be.phil was born colourful, full of emotion just like every other human. he tries to be just how he's wanted to be, but each day the task grows harder and harder, and phil finds himself wearing a mask of happiness wherever he goes.when dan is forced to return to his home planet, he's lost all hope. when phil arrives at his favorite cliff side, he has as well. when the two meet, both of their world's rapidly change...but is it for the better or worse?~a story about finding your true colors~





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this story is based off of the short film Colour Bandits by kickthepj on youtube. it is absolutely fantastic and i would greatly appreciate if you would check it and the rest of the kickthepj channel out.
> 
> a huge thank you to my friend gretchen (@/pjforestkid on twitter) for giving me so much help and encouragement while writing this story!
> 
> last but not least, i'd like to note that mental illnesses like depression, anti-social personality disorder, or any others that result in a person not experiencing emotions (whether that be permanently or temporarily) do NOT exist in this universe. thank you and enjoy :)

prologue.  
~a shell of the lightest pastels to the darkest hues,  
housing burning reds, spirited greens and muted blues...

colour. 

ah, what an insane and incredible subject. 

everything that is alive is full of multiple contrasting hues, whether they be the brightest yellow, the darkest grey, or the uncountable number of others that can be found in between. within each and every breathing creature lies colour, whether it they be from this universe, or from another. colour establishes everything that is worth searching for, that is worth expressing for, that is worth living for. colour is existence. 

colour is never ending. it is forever. it’s the right brain’s version of the left brain’s numbers, stretching on infinitely with more combinations than any mind could fathom. it is found inside every organism you encounter. it establishes uniqueness, giving its owner a mind and feelings like no one else. yes, the colour you know of is something you see in inanimate objects too, but this physicality, rather than being caused by the reflection of light, is produced entirely by the living creatures extending their internal colour to the nonliving objects throughout the universes. even to those who cannot physically see their world have colour shining within them, for colour is primarily felt rather than viewed. colour exists deep inside the souls of the living, and can be released and spread across the nonliving objects within worlds freely without consequence, for colour that is given willingly is regained painlessly. colour is given to every living organism the instant they are born. colour is the very foundation of all personalities and feelings. colour shapes beings into who they are. colour is everyday life. colour is forever existing. colour is emotion.

everyone. experiences. colour. 

everyone, that is, besides dan.

1.  
~with no motive, reason, or rational behind his ways,  
except to desaturate worlds and leave completely unphased…

dan licked his dry lips softly, the salt that floated through the near-seaside air entering his mouth and stinging his tongue as he did so. he was crouched behind the chimney of a tall brightly coloured building, viewing the picturesque beachside scene below him. children Aquarianites darted back and forth between the sea and the land, shrieking with an immature sense of glee when they stood where the tide rose for a second too long, getting their webbed feet splashed with the cool water. any fool knew that the Aquarianites were not affected by water temperature, as their amphibious nature made them able to live within the liquid or on land comfortably, so dan reckoned the children were simply mimicking the reaction they’d seen from other species when they’d touched the icy water on their last visit to Aquariania, expecting the vibrant orange liquid to be warm.

colours were everywhere but didn’t necessarily mean the same things. 

looking past the children, dan focused on the purple stones that glittered on the beach, sparkling as if full of diamonds that his race so dearly treasured. blue and green plants sprouted from between the rocks, gaining their energy from the light emitted from the red clouds above. beautiful architecture stretched across the beach, glinting in flawless shades of auburn and pearl, decorated with the most precisely intricate details that made dan wonder if the designers of the buildings had been the Cyacts. 

he had traveled to many different planets and galaxies throughout the universes, as creatures like himself tended to do. however, instead of seeing the beauty within places such as Aquariania, dan saw nothing but the colour and the smiles on the children’s faces. it burned his eyes. 

colour? joy? it was a privilege, although many lifeforms didn’t realize it, and if everyone couldn’t have it, well, (dan chuckled dryly to himself at this thought:) no one deserved to have it at all. 

with this internal proclamation, dan stood up on top of the roof, careful that he kept his balance on the angled yellow surface. none of the Aquarianites noticed him, for they were too busy with their mockery. this, was not a problem for dan. 

carefully the young man closed his eyes, though an onlooker wouldn’t be able to tell through his dark goggles. his nose scrunched slightly with his concentration. slowly but surely he began to feel the tickling sensation that had grown oh so familiar over the past twenty seven years of his life. it was a sign that it was working. 

dan continued to stay focused, until the children’s laughs became nothing but a dull buzz in the back of his mind, until he could no longer smell the salt in the air. the tickling feeling began to grow more intense, almost like a sharp pain throughout his entire body, but still comfortable in its familiarity. 

and now all of his external senses were gone. he could no longer hear, nor smell the factors mentioned previously. he was completely in his own bubble of hyper awareness; only aware of his own body and mind, not the welfare of others. the pain had raised extremely in a short amount of time, speeding through his body, burning his insides as easily as fire would to sticks. it hurt. it hurt like absolute hell, and yet dan persisted, welcoming the feeling, knowing the result it would give him and yet hoping for a different one. god, how he hoped for something good, something real, something that would avenge his best friend, something that would save him…

without meaning to, dan let out a bloodcurdling scream, opening his eyes yet seeing nothing. he couldn’t. he couldn’t hear, or smell, or taste, or breathe. he was frozen, his own power taking complete control over his body, and yet he allowed it to, wanted it to even. the pain was unbearable, excruciating, horrific, malicious. it was swarming within him, stabbing his insides from every direction. but it was wonderful. it was working!!

and suddenly, with one powerful burst of energy, dan was blasted backwards and off his feet, landing on his back on the rooftop. the pain ceased immediately, leaving him with a numb mind. everything was absolutely silent and still. 

slowly, his vision came back to him, and dan removed the goggles from his face, marks deeply imprinted in his skin from where they had laid. his eyes were met with a perfectly and genuine white sky.

he carefully sat up, peering over the edge of the building, seeing exactly what he expected to see. the ocean was white and rippling, the clouds were invisible against the colourless sky, the buildings had seemingly been painted with unpigmented liquid, and the Aquarianites were, guessably, white, silent and staring at each other. as far as the eye could see, the land and all its subjects appeared to be a colouring book waiting to be used, and dan knew without searching that the entire planet was just the same. 

and then they came. the screams. one by one, not just the children who had been playing in the water but also all other Aquarianites on the globe, crying out in absolute pain and agony, all white and stripped of the colour they’d had for all their lives. dan could feel no pity for them, turning away from the children who now had tears running down their faces. _they deserve it._

looking down at his white coat sleeve and pulling up the fabric, dan stared at his own skin, still more chalky than regular caucasian tones should be, his noticeable failure stingingly present but not any less expected than the whiteness of the land surrounding him. he was still the empty shell he was every day, and the land he’d destroyed was still as miserable as ever. slowly he took a small (white) notebook out of his coat pocket and inside it added another tally mark to the 9879 others that remained inside. then, he simply disappeared in thin air, leaving the screaming souls that he’d damned behind him.


	2. Chapter 2

~and falls to his already weakened knees and contemplates the sweet relief of becoming something more…

dan was an empty and broken picture frame, thrown away the minute he was bought, labeled useless as soon as his wrappings were torn off and his cracks revealed. within his heart was a void waiting to be filled with the colours of a photograph, and yet his broken frame would not keep the image in its rightful place. dan was a shell of a human, desaturated and outstanding in all universes, easily identified as one of the few outcasts that are unable to feel like other beings do. dan, well dan was a colour bandit, one of the universes’ achromatics that was whispered about in black alleyways and used as the villain in a fairytale, truthfully labeled as “emotionless, colourless freaks” by every creature in existence. the galaxies would never accept him, for why would they welcome a person so different, and whose only goal appeared to be to suck the colour out of every last organism and object until there was nothing left but white? 

dan appeared in Dust, a crumbled planet, claimed by the colour bandits as a safe place away from the rest of the world. no one besides his fellow misfits came here, and even so the colour bandits rarely stopped by, only doing so if they needed a different uniform or a new idea from a fellow member of how to terrorize their next victim planet. there only appeared to be two other colour bandits in the area of Dust that dan had teleported to, though there could be more hiding behind chunks of space rock that floated in the air. “no luck, howell?” one of his fellow members jeered, the woman next to him cackling as if it was the funniest joke she’d heard. dan looked at them blankly, use to their hypocritical insults, and then flew over to his usual resting place, which was a bit of the use-to-be planet that had a cave inside. entering the cave dan thought of how not a single colour bandit had ever been proven to succeed at their mission, only rumored it, for their sudden disappearance could only mean so, right? 

disappearance. what a disgusting word. dan sighed, taking his goggles off his face and brushing vibrant dust off of them, doing the same to his curly white hair. Aquariania had been one of the most colourful place’s dan had destroyed in a while, given the amount of dust that was coated to his uniform. next he took off the strips of cloth wrapped around his hands and the long scarf around his neck, leaving him only in his jacket, shirt, pants, and boots, all white and colourless. setting his garments to the side, dan layed back on a stone slab that had served him as a bed throughout the years. it too, lacked colour. 

the young man stared out into the galaxy, watching as floating remains of Dust passed him by, glancing at stars that twinkled far out in the distance, all of them colours like blue, red, and green, scattered throughout the pink and cyan sky that lived beyond the white atmosphere of Dust. dan would never admit this out loud, but sometimes he wished he were one of those stars, beautiful and admirable, full of colour and far, far away from here. it would be better than what he was now, a criminal, hated by all, emotionless and colourless, an outcast to the universes. 

his vision blurred by water that formed in his eyes, something new and unexplainable that had recently started happening to dan whenever he had thoughts like these. he blinked and brushed the drops away, waiting for the water to stop coming, like it always did eventually. dan looked at the entrance to his cave, hoping that neither of the colour bandits outside would come in to mock him, for the last thing he needed was another thing to make him different from everyone else. neither of them came though, and so dan remained laying there, water flowing down his face in tiny streams, staring up at the stars he so longed to be.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just want to apologize because i know this fic is sort of slow at the beginning but i promise it all does have a purpose to the overall story. i hope you all will continue to read :)

~they'll extract until colour no longer crosses against their path, laughing sweetly as they make luminosity feel their calm, evasive wrath…

“wake up,” a voice hissed at him.

groaning, dan opened his eyes a crack, and was met with another pair of white ones, just like his own. “noh i’m slweeping,” dan muttered, turning back on his side. 

the voice’s owner kicked him in the side, making dan yelp in surprise. “we’re going to Earth today,” the voice pressed. “emphasis on the word we’re; i’m not going back home alone.”

dan opened his eyes again and stared at the person in front of him. “it’s not home,” he said dryly. 

the young man rolled his eyes, copying the action of annoyance despite his inability to feel it. “well, maybe not, but it’s where we’re from, and people might recognize us. i need you there to be my shield in case they try to murder me!!”

dan sat up and grabbed his scarf from the pile of clothing next to him. “gee thanks, pj.”

the man, pj, shrugged and exited the cave, already fully clothed, his goggles sitting on top of his unruly mop of curly hair. dan quickly dawned the rest of his uniform and followed him outside. he found his friend, as that is what he’d come to refer to pj in his mind as, staring out at the floating rocks of Dust. the colour bandits had only found the destroyed planet about a week ago in Earth terms, and yet it was already colourless, used as a place to practice using their powers daily, especially for the younger bandits that hadn’t dealt with real places yet. 

“they probably won’t remember us anyway,” dan continued. “it’s been, what?, twenty-some years since we’ve been there last? we were just children.”

pj nodded reluctantly. “the cursed year, one where two colourless children were born on the same planet. a rarity no one wanted.”

“fuck them, then,” dan said. “they’ll get what they deserve today.”

pj looked at him coldly. “that’s not the point of our missions.”

“might as well be. that’s the only result we ever get. who cares what happens to them anyway? it’s a pain they deserve for having colour and treating us like shit.”  
pj looked away from dan then, a frown on his lips, his eyebrows crinkled. “i don’t know…they are our race...our families...maybe we should care for them.”

dan laughed dryly. “you know that’s impossible for us to do, peej.”

his friend’s frown depended. “maybe not…”

dan sighed. “if you don’t want the humans to get hurt, why would the Senior Bandit assign you Earth anyway?”

a glimmer of excitement flickered in pj’s eyes. “Earth is where we’re from and she thought that, well, maybe it’ll actually work this time. at least, that’s what she told me. i think i’m sort of an experiment right now.”

dan’s eyes widened. it might work?! “then what are we waiting for?” he quickly grabbed pj’s hand inhaled deeply. “ready?”

pj’s hesitated for a second, and then nodded his head. “ready.”

they both disappeared.


End file.
